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I awoke with a start and took in my surroundings. I recognized the room I was in, and it wasn’t at Terry’s house.
The bed I was lying on was centered in the room and draped with a crimson sheet and blanket. There were two chairs and table sitting in a corner of the square chamber that were the sole furnishings outside of the bed. A fireplace containing a modest fire added little light and no heat to the chill room. The only other illumination was a bluish actinic light, coming from a small window high in one of the walls, that fell on my chest. It had been the light in my face that had roused me from my slumber.
Fear blossomed in my heart as I turned and saw a crumpled form lying on the floor. Without thought I climbed off the bed and crept over to the person on the floor. My hands encountered something sticky as I neared him. I knew what it was without looking, and the circumstance struck me as cruelly symbolic: I certainly had blood on my hands now, if never before.
Reaching out, I pulled the corpse toward me and was unsurprised when a face that might have been my own came into view. The pasty white face was locked in an accusatory grimace seasoned with pain. The boy had suffered for a long time before dying, and at my own hand. Remorse filled me as I remembered how his death came about. I knelt before him, gathered his cold, stiff body to me and cried.
“Why cry now?” Asked the dead young man in my arms.
“Because,” I answered, “I killed you. I didn’t mean to.”
“Yes you did,” he charged as he pulled away from me. “You’re a killer at the basest level.”
As he raised his already red-stained hand to wipe away the fresh blood leaking from his nose, he glared at me through his bloody eyes, waiting for a response. I could not meet them.
“You’re right. I did. I was a different person then. So much has happened…”
“You say you’re a different person?” He queried. “Then how did you end up back here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar.”
I looked up at him, his eyes hostile and cold. “I don’t know where here is.”
“Look around. You know.”
I did as he asked, and saw nothing different. The walls were seamless with no doors or windows other than the one high above, and it was out of reach.
“This is…”
“This is where you live, Brian. You were gone for a while, but you came back. You’ll always come back,” my victim said with grim satisfaction.
“No. I am not that person anymore.”
“Sure you are. Look at what you did to Jesus Garza and Todd Langley.”
“They started that fight,” I said defensively.
“No, Kellam,” came another grim voice from behind. “You started it. You did everything in your power to start that fight.”
Without turning, I replied, “No, they started it. They wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“You know what your problem is Brian?” Pete sneered angrily. “You’re always the victim. They wouldn’t leave you alone? You charged right up to them and dared them to give you a reason to go off. You were looking for that fight!”
I started “I couldn’t stand by and let them…”
“You! You couldn’t do this and you didn’t do that! It’s all about you, you selfish mother fucker!”
He paused a moment, waiting for a reaction that wasn’t coming.
“You know I’m never coming back,” Pete stated brutally.
“Yes, I know,” I responded quietly, all haughtiness gone from my tone.
“I’m not coming back, Brian!” Pete barked savagely.
“I know! I know what I did and I’m taking responsibility for it!”
“How? Just how does trying to blame someone else for what happened show that you’re taking responsibility?”
“You know what?” I started angrily. “Fuck you, alright? It wasn’t that simple.”
Pete negated my statement. “Bullshit. It was that simple. All you had to do was walk away, but you wouldn’t do that. Now you have to accept that I’m gone out of your life. For good. And it’s your fault.”
“It’s our fault, Pete. Yours and mine. We had a relationship…”
“Yeah, a relationship that failed because you were so wrapped up in yourself you didn’t give a shit about me! The blame for this rests with you, Kellam! Get it through your thick skull! It’s over, and it’s your fucking fault!”
I stood thunderstruck as Pete reared back and threw a roundhouse punch straight at my nose.
“No!”
Breathing hard, I sat up, peering through the darkness to discern my location. The dim illumination leaking around the curtains outlined a lamp on a desk near me. I walked to it and barked my shin on the desk chair before turning the light on. I didn’t recognize the room I was in, but I knew where I was. I listened carefully, straining to hear a sound that might indicate someone was aware I was awake, but no one seemed to be stirring.
A survey of the room revealed a gym bag someone had delivered when I had been unconscious. When I opened it I thankfully found some sweats included. I covered my body quickly and crept out to find the front door. Someone was asleep on the couch, snoring lightly, but it was a simple matter to make my way past them. I unlocked the door and opened it. An electronic beep sounded, its tone continuing as I threw open the door and ran out of the house. Maybe a quarter of a minute later, the house alarm sounded for a few seconds, and then was silenced. I might have heard a baritone voice calling my name as the house receded in the distance, but I didn’t look back to find out.
I took off on the nearest road I could find and ran in a westward direction. I knew roughly where Terry’s house was in relation to my own, and I knew it lay behind me some three or four miles. I had no idea where I was going beyond that.
Hours passed, and the sky turned gray in the east. I continued running. Another hour passed, and the sun peeked up over the Cascade mountains to illuminate the cold autumn day. More time passed. I stopped by a fast flowing creek to quench my growing thirst when the sun had reached its zenith. I continued running, but this time I turned around to head home.
It took me an hour to get back to the frontage road along Highway 26, and I was surprised to find I was not that far out of town, but still a healthy run on a normal day away from home. Being that I had already run for something near five hours made it even more of a challenge.
My thoughts had drifted through the morning, resting primarily on Pete’s departure from my life. My dream had brought my culpability sharply into focus, and it was eating away at me the entire time. Efforts to center myself failed for the most part, only allowing me to find peace for moments at a time instead of the hours I craved.
When I arrived home, I felt anxious but exhilarated. I had no idea how far I had run or how long. My body was primed and I could have run for hours longer, but I knew that my mom, Kevin, and the rest would be worried, so I had to go home.
I turned up the driveway leading to the house, I slowed to a fast walk to warm down and give myself time to collect my scattered thoughts in preparation for the confrontations to come. With fifty yards to go, the front door flew open and my mother raced toward me.
Football has its benefits. The only thing that allowed me to withstand the impact when she reached me was the training I had received during the countless hours of practice.
“Brian Andrew Kellam!” Mom shouted after a long moment of constriction, holding me at arm’s length, “Where on Earth have you been?”
“I… uh… went for a run.”
“You went for a run?” She repeated, her consternation quite clear in her tone. “You went for a run. Brian, do you have any idea what time it is? Do you have any idea what you have put us through? Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? For all we knew you’d been run over by a car! The school called and said you never made it! Right this instant you have Kevin, Jason, Ray, Tomas and Terry out looking for you, and every one of them is worried sick about you!”
“I’m sorry,” I responded, struggling to keep the annoyance I felt out of my voice and failing.
“Don’t take that tone, Brian! Do you know what time it is?” My mother asked once more.
“Around two, I guess,” I replied, sulking.
“No, it’s four thirty,” she snapped. “You’ve been running since four this morning!”
I blinked, taking in the implications of my mother’s words. Twelve hours and more running around the suburban hills on a cool winter day, and yet my body only felt energized and ready to continue. I looked behind me longingly.
“Don’t even think it, young man. You knew you had an appointment with Dr. Wilkins this afternoon, and you take off running. You are sixteen, Brian, but sometimes you act as though you are half that old. You have responsibilities….”
“Okay,” I interrupted. “Enough already. I get the idea.”
“Don’t think you’ve heard the last of this. First you skip school, as if that isn’t bad enough, then you forget about your appointment with Dr. Wilkins. Kevin, Jason, Tomas and Terry have been out looking for you since six this morning! You owe a lot of people an apology, and you have some home time coming up as well.”
“You’re grounding me,” I stated in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“I think it’s appropriate given your lack of concern for your own well being, your blatant disregard of your responsibilities and your duty to your family.”
“Duty?”
“You owe it to us to at least let us know you’re safe!”
“I was fine,” I rejoined sullenly.
“How was I supposed to know that? The last thing Tomas saw was your backside running down the street! By the time he got in his car to chase you down, you were gone!”
“Mom, you can’t ground me. I have the alliance and everything.”
“They’ll get along fine without you. From what I hear, there are enough people to keep it going.” An odd smile and a note of pride filled her voice for a moment, but then she turned serious. “I mean it, Brian. You’re restricted for two weeks.”
“Two weeks? Oh, come on!”
“Do you want to go for a month?”
“Fuh…”
“Brian Andrew Kellam! Language!”
Mom peered at me through narrowed eyes, observed me as I smoothed my expression to a poker face, an expression she had seen a hundred times before when I was younger; before Pete and I learned of our shared love; before I closed myself off and nearly killed myself with my anger. Her expression shifted from anger to worry as quickly as my expression had neutralized.
“I need a shower,” I said tightly through clinched teeth, and then I strode angrily away from her with my back stiff, entering the house without looking back. Once in my room, I stripped and threw on a pair of shorts before entering the bathroom and starting the shower. While I waited for the water to warm up, I splashed my face with water from the sink, and then examined the person glaring back at me from the mirror. The most striking feature I saw was the eyes. They were hard and flat, with no fire in them. I had seen eyes exactly like them before. I wore those eyes for three years, before they had been shattered by someone who could see behind them; someone who knew what lay hidden behind the dead, lifeless orbs. At that moment, I wasn’t certain there was anything left to hide.
I climbed in the shower and allowed the cascade to wash over my body, praying the steamy hot water would leach out the suppressed rage I had swallowed just moments earlier. At some point a knock sounded at the door.
“Brian,” my mother called through the cracked open door, “Dinner is ready.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Brian, you have to…” Mom responded.
“Mom, just go away,” I interrupted. “Leave me alone.”
“Brian, get out of the shower this instant,” she commanded.
“No. Just leave me alone, all right? You have no idea why I went running and you didn’t even ask.”
“Brian…”
“You put me on restriction without hearing anything I might have had to say. You didn’t even ask. Fine – you do what you think you need to do. I’ll do the same, and right now that means I don’t want dinner, I don’t want to talk to you, and I want to be left alone. Is that too much to ask?”
A few seconds of silence punctuated by the hiss of the water striking my body and the tub floor passed before my mother spoke again.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she said in a voice just loud enough to hear, and then shut the door leaving me alone again.
The anger and frustration grew as I stood under the water. I felt like I wanted to cry, but there were no tears. There was nothing but an awful, all too familiar void inside. The hole in my gut was empty, which was good. I knew from experience there was plenty of room to store what I could no longer afford to have.
My attacker moved quickly, striking before I could evade him. His fist hit me in the solar plexus, on the sternum and the face in rapid succession. I felt myself falling backwards and braced for the impact. Even so, the shock ran throughout my body, adding to the disorientation.
A shadow fell over me. A form silhouetted by the sun stared down.
“Get up.”
I struggled to do as I was told. Rolling over and getting to my knees took an effort. My assailant kicked me, sending me sprawling.
“Get up!”
I forced myself to my knees once more, and then managed to rise to my feet. A shadow fell next to mine. I turned to face source and found myself staring at a faceless form, their features blotted out by the sun behind them.
“You’re pathetic,” a voice taunted. “You’re weak, and you’re pathetic.”
“At least I’m standing up for what I believe in!” I shouted back through fattened and bloodied lips. “At least I’m not afraid of my own shadow!”
“No, you’re just dead!” Pete roared back.
“What do you mean, dead?”
“Dead! You killed yourself in a fight- a fight you could have walked away from! I told you this would happen!”
“This is insane,” I wondered. “I’ve got to be dreaming.”
“No. No, this is real. You’re alone, and you’re dead. I know it, and you know it, and we both know it’s all your fault!”
Pete launched at me, and again I felt the impact of his fist connecting with my cheek. I went with the force of the punch to soften the blow, and then turned to face my ex-boyfriend.
“If you try to hit me again,” I warned in a low voice, “I’m going to hit back.”
“What’s taking you so long? You like fighting so much, then fight!”
“Don’t push me!”
“Why not? What are you going to do?” He shoved me back a step. “Hit me?” He shoved me again, and I took another step back.
“I’m warning you, Pete!”
“Warning me?” He mimicked sarcastically. “Come on, Kellam. Show me what you got!”
Pete attempted to push me, but I deflected his arms to the side and pushed back, causing him to move several steps to the side.
“You aren’t worth the energy it would take. I’m done. Leave me alone and I’ll do the same for you. Good bye, Pete.”
I turned on my heel and walked away.
“Don’t turn your back on me!”
I heard him coming at me and turned. Pete had his arm back, ready to strike. I reached back, and started forward. His punch was easily blocked as I threw my own.
Sitting up in bed, I realized that another nightmare had just ended. I couldn’t remember whether or not I had actually hit Pete in my dream, not that it really mattered much. The fact I had tried, even in a dream, told me all I needed to know.
Sighing, I turned on the light and looked again at the stark surroundings of my room. It still felt harsh and empty, not unlike a prison cell. The comparison made me shake my head. For the following two weeks at least it would be a prison cell, given the restriction my mother had meted out.
I went to bed and slept fitfully until my alarm woke me at five. Rather than risk my mother’s further wrath, I decided running would not be an option. Instead, I went out to the workshop for a work out. The weight machine had seen little use while I had been playing football, but since the fight and my dismissal from the team, I had been using it regularly. Now that I was restricted as well, the workshop and my room were the only places I could consider a refuge, and tenuous at that. Breaking myself out of that train of thought, I let myself get lost in the rhythm of the workout.
“Brian, get ready for school,” my mother called some time later. “You have time for a shower and some cereal before I drop you off.”
I didn’t respond, finishing the current set I was working on. Mom didn’t wait around, and returned to the house, used to my habits. It was amusing toying with the idea of ignoring my mother completely, but realized it would be counterproductive at best. After a quick shower, I ate a small bowl of cereal and had a glass of orange juice to wash it down. Ray and Dawn were ready to go by the time I had finished.
Ray said nothing to me at all, giving me the evil eye for having disappeared. I knew it would only be a matter of time before he let me have it, and I knew I deserved it. I accepted responsibility for not calling to let them know I was okay, and for skipping school, even though I felt being alone was what I needed to do at the time.
When Mom stopped the car, I opened the door. She caught my arm.
“Brian, I will meet you here at noon for your appointment with Dr. Wilkins.”
“Fine,” I acknowledged her and got out of the car, walking into the school without another word or glance.
Tomas and Terry were looking for me at the door. Both appeared angry and anxious. Before either of them could light into me, I held up my hand.
“If you guys are going to yell at me, don’t. I’m sorry that I scared you, and I’m sorry I made you waste your time looking for me. My mother has restricted me to the house for the next two weeks or more, so if you really want to yell at me, come over tonight and we’ll go to the barn and you can scream until your heart’s content.”
“Why, Brian?” Terry asked quietly. “All I want to know is why.” Tomas nodded his agreement.
I sighed, knowing that I at least owed them that much. They motioned me toward the caf, and I followed them, talking on the way.
“I’ll explain it as best I can. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I use running as a sort of meditation. I zone out and my subconscious takes over… although I wasn’t very successful at that yesterday…. Anyway, I can get a lot of heavy thinking done when I need to, and yesterday when I kind of lost it…. Well, you guys were there. I’ve only done that once before: the day I convinced myself that Pete was gone from my life the first time. I didn’t know anything about him or his life then. Now I know for certain he’s gone, and I had to adjust. I did that yesterday.”
“What does that mean, Brian? I mean, how does that change things for you?” Tomas asked.
“Good questions, and hard to answer with anything specific.” I was quiet for a moment as I thought. “I guess it means that I’m moving on.”
“You’re over him?” Tomas asked for the clarification.
“Over him? No. I’ll probably never be over him. But it does mean I’m putting him behind me.”
We arrived at the caf to see our table was full. Friends I didn’t even know existed had taken up residence, filling it to capacity and commandeering the tables next to it. People I knew only in passing were greeting me, slapping me on the back and trying to shake my hand. I smiled and said something appropriate, all the while wondering what in the hell had possessed me to start a club that would put me exactly where I didn’t want to be: the center of attention. Fortunately the bell rang, allowing me a quick escape.
As they were walking me to my locker, Terry said, “We’ll be over tonight after practice to talk. You didn’t get a chance to tell us about you and Pete, and I think that would help you.”
“I have a shrink, Terry, but thanks.” I said with a touch of sarcasm.
He reached out and slapped my head. “Yeah, but does he kick your ass when you deserve it?”
I chuckled in spite of myself. “No, he doesn’t do that. I suppose that’s what you’re for.”
“You got that right, brother,” Terry confirmed heartily.
“You talk my mom in to letting me have visitors and I’ll talk, but you guys better be ready to work out.”
“Work out after practice?” Tomas asked incredulously.
“Sure. I do – did it a lot. Anyway, I have an appointment with my shrink today. Mom is picking me up at noon,” I informed them.
“We’ll be here.”
Part of my mom’s punishment for my taking off was refusing to write an excusing note for my absence. She thought that would somehow teach me responsibility for my actions. I managed to control my temper as she made her pronouncement, and then turned away and didn’t speak to her again unless absolutely necessary.
My teachers all had something to say about my lack of excuse, nearly all of them expressing their disbelief, and continuing to remind me that my grades did not give me the right to skip. I took it all in and buried it along with my anger toward my mom. My math and physics instructor, Mr. Thomas almost smiled when I handed him the assignments that were due, including the one I had missed.
I didn’t hold out much hope for my friends getting permission to come over. My mother was on the war path, and that meant I was going to be isolated until she was placated. This time, however, I felt I had to resist as a matter of principle. I had done as I needed to do – and she was punishing me for making the decision that I needed time to myself to come to terms with what had happened.
When the bell rang at noon, I trudged to my locker and dropped off all my books. Tomas and Terry were standing at the office true to their word, and they were talking to my mother. As I walked up, I heard her response to their question.
“I’m sorry, but the answer is no. Brian is in a considerable amount of trouble right now, and he needs to spend some time at home thinking about what he did.”
“Let’s go,” I interrupted brusquely. “See you guys tomorrow.”
“Hey, Kellam,” Terry called after me.
I looked back over my shoulder, and saw his helpless expression. Tomas looked troubled.
“Call me,” Terry mouthed so my mother couldn’t hear. I nodded once and walked out the door.
I got in the car and wordlessly buckled in. I stared straight ahead and did not look anywhere else except my hands in my lap for the entire twenty minute trip into the city. Mom tried to make conversation along the way but abandoned the effort when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to talk. When we arrived, she got out of the car and followed me into Will’s office, sitting next to me. I deliberately got up, picked up a random magazine, and sat back down on the opposite side of the waiting room.
“Brian, don’t be so childish!” Mom snapped. I continued to ignore her.
The office door opened. Dr. Wilkins was a gaunt man standing a shade under six feet, and wore a salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. Although receding slightly, he still had a thick head of hair which he kept neatly combed. The overall effect made it hard to determine how old he was. Middle aged, certainly, but he could be forty or fifty-five. He wore a shirt and tie, but somehow made them seem casual attire. His mobile face held a smile that reached his eyes.
“Dr. Wilkins, thank goodness,” Mom began. “We have a problem.”
“Oh?” Will’s smile fell a bit when he looked at me, his penetrating eyes meeting my own. “Hello, Brian.”
“Hi, Will.”
“Have a problem, do we?” He asked curiously.
“We? Not really,” I commented blandly, forcing myself to keep my eyes on Will and not look at my mother.
“I see. Shall we come into my office now?”
Mom stood and strode quickly into the room, garnering a raised eyebrow from the psychiatrist. He looked at me again, and I met his gaze steadily, holding a blank expression.
“After you, Brian.”
Dr. Wilkins’ office was a large room, about twenty by thirty. The walls were lined with bookcases made with dark stained wood, which were mostly filled with books on psychology. A few shelves scattered here and there held knick knacks and pictures that were illuminated by a light mounted underneath the shelf above. One shelf held an eagle collection, another held pictures of Dr. Wilkins’ family. Yet another shelf held plastic models of several different ships, dating from an eighteenth century three-masted ship-of-the-line to a modern aircraft carrier.
His desk was in front of the back window wall, slightly masked by wooden vertical blinds stained to match the bookshelves. There were two padded chairs in front of the desk, in one of which my mother was sitting. A large Persian carpet was placed in the center, with five chairs identical to those near his desk around a small coffee table on it. The lamps in the room cast a warm glow in direct contrast with the dim light outside.
I sat in a chair on the carpet, my back to the corner of the room facing the desk.
“Brian…” My mom began, but then cut off as I looked away from her. “You see what I’m dealing with? He ran away yesterday.”
“What precisely do you mean, Mrs. Kellam?” the doctor asked as he took his seat behind the desk.
“He went over to a friend’s house on Monday night, ostensibly to eat pizza and do homework.” I held my peace, determined to let her finish before I said anything. “He didn’t come home. Kevin went over and left a sweat suit or something for him, and then told me when he got back that Brian’d had some sort of breakdown, and that he was sleeping.”
“I see,” Will said, casting a quick, penetrating glance in my direction.
“Then yesterday morning, Brian gets up at four in the morning, sets off the house alarm where he’s staying, and literally runs off into the night, not to be seen or heard from for over twelve hours! What am I supposed to do with him?”
“Mrs. Kellam, what did Brian say when he returned?”
“Nothing. He smarted off to me, and now he won’t talk to me to tell me what’s happening with him.”
“Brian?” Will asked, inviting me into the dialog.
“I didn’t say anything because you never gave me the chance,” I said quietly. “You put me on restriction before asking.”
“But I did ask,” she responded.
“By that time I didn’t want to talk to you. You had already made up your mind, and nothing I said or did would have changed it. It never does.”
“I don’t think that’s fair, Brian,” my mom started, but she was interrupted by Will.
“Mrs. Kellam,” he said, standing up and motioning toward me, “please.”
He walked around his desk and sat across from me. My mother joined us.
“It sounds like you gave everyone quite a scare,” the man observed quietly in a soothing voice. “Care to tell me why?”
“I needed to think about what’s happened, and I think best when I’m running.”
“For twelve hours?” Mom interjected incredulously.
“Mrs. Kellam, please let him speak without interruption. Go ahead, Brian. What were you thinking about?”
“Everything,” I answered. “What I did, Pete leaving as a result, how I’m going to go on… everything.”
Will asked, “And what happened Monday night?”
“The realization that Pete is gone hit me. I kind of went… numb, I guess. Tomas and Terry, my friends, helped me out and called Kevin. They put me to bed, and I woke up and knew I needed to run; to think.”
“So you used the running to come to terms with your separation from Pete?” Will inquired carefully.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied. “It finally sank in on Monday night and during the run.” I looked at my mother and did the best I could to keep the bitterness out of my tone. “I was doing what I needed to do to take care of myself, mom. Will says running is a form of meditation. It’s what I do when I need to think If you’d given me a chance to explain, I would have told you that, but you jumped to grounding me without giving me a chance.”
The anger was beginning to leak out in my tone. “You said it yourself. I’m sixteen. I have responsibilities. Will has taught me that one of those is taking care of myself, and that is what I was doing.” Suppressed anger began to leach into my tone in spite of my efforts to contain it. “I’m sorry I worried you and I’m sorry that what I did doesn’t meet with your approval, but I needed to do it!”
My mom looked at me, her expression difficult to read. I looked away so I wouldn’t glare at her and ended up looking out the window behind Will’s desk. After several long moments, Mom cleared her throat and spoke quietly.
“I’m sorry, Brian. You’re right. I was worried and I didn’t give you the chance to explain. It’s hard for me to remember you’re almost a man, that you aren’t a little boy, and I tend to overreact.”
I looked back at her and saw a sincere sorrow in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, son.”
“Thank you, Mom. You’re right too. I should have let you know what was happening.”
“Perhaps in the future it might be appropriate for Brian to let you know when he feels you aren’t giving him a chance to speak,” Will suggested.
“Yes,” my mom responded without hesitation. “Yes, please, Brian. I’ll try to remember. Let me know if I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“I’m trying, Brian,” my mother said with a hint of desperation.
“I know, Mom,” I answered. Tears formed in my eyes as I thought of Pete, the love of my life, and how very much I missed him at that and every other moment since he’d left.
“I’m trying, too.”